Event Planned To Drum Up Support For Agency

GUILFORD — People of all ages are invited to become little drummer boys and girls at a Community Drumming Event designed to benefit an area social service agency.

Admission to the event at the Nathanael Greene Community Center is a free-will offering to benefit the SARAH Tuxis human services agency. The two-hour event, on Jan. 18 at 2 p.m., is being co-sponsored by the Shoreline Alliance for the Arts and the Guilford Parks and Recreation Department.

Dr. Terry Macy, executive director of SARAH Tuxis, which provides residential services to people with disabilities in the shoreline area, said the drumming event is designed to bring SARAH clients together with other townspeople in a more diverse environment.

``They'll be elbow to elbow with folks without disabilities,'' Macy said. ``The drumming event is one of the things we're doing. We're doing various arts pursuits with our people.''

The agency is ``trying to do a variety of things that will get our folks more integrated into the communities in which they live,'' Macy said.

SARAH Tuxis has ``developed a unified arts program whereby persons with disabilities and persons without disabilities work together to realize the artistic abilities in each of them,'' Macy said of the arts programs.

Helping the novice and experienced drummers will be facilitator Bob Bloom, who teaches percussion at the Boston Center for Adult Education, the Interface Foundation and at Manchester Community- Technical College. Bloom is an artist-in-residence in some Connecticut schools as well and is a facilitator for Rhythm For Life, a nonprofit national organization devoted to the use of drumming as a communal activity.

The The arts alliance is a regional arts service organization, which presents performing and visual arts events and coordinates a student/community outreach program. The Guilford Parks and Recreation Department also has a longstanding commitment to the arts, Macy said, and both have long supported the work of SARAH, he said.